SOURCE: Jonsson, Inge. “The Age and the Man,” and “New Jerusalem in the World.” In Emanuel Swedenborg, translated from the Swedish by Catherine Djurklou, pp. 13-28; 182-95. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1971.

In the first essay below, Jonsson examines the historical period in which Swedenborg lived and wrote before presenting an introductory biographical sketch of and presenting an overview of his most important works. In the second, she offers an analysis of Swedenborg's importance in the history of ideas, noting particularly his influence on writers such as William Blake, Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. B. Yeats, Honoré Balzac, Victor Hugo, and George Sand.

The Age and the Man

I the Intellectual Climate

T. S. Eliot has coined the phrase “dissociation of sensibility” to define the impact on Western intellectual history of the scientific breakthrough of the seventeenth century. As a result of a tremendous expansion in man's...